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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoDISPATCH file photoRichard Ross, state superintendent, has taken a hard line on the third-grade reading guarantee. An Education Department official said the legislature is responsible for the voucher-student exemption.

Third-graders in traditional public schools and charter schools will be held back if they can’t
pass a state reading test, but those who receive taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools
will not be.

They are exempt from Ohio’s third-grade reading guarantee.

But as a group, those voucher students performed worse on the reading test than students in the
state’s school districts did.

Of the voucher students who took the test last fall, just over 36 percent, or almost 1,200,
would be held back this year if the guarantee applied them.

That’s a higher failure rate than in the state’s school districts, where 34 percent of
third-graders would be held back, based on the results of the fall test. Students can take the test
again this spring, and yet again in the summer.

The Ohio Department of Education website says that the guarantee “ensures that every struggling
reader gets the support he or she needs to be able to learn and achieve.”

Richard Ross, Ohio’s superintendent of public instruction, has taken a hard line on the
guarantee, saying that passing kids along who can’t read at their grade level doesn’t do them any
favors. The guarantee “just has to be,” Ross told
The Dispatch in December. “We just have to stop this nonsense and teach them to read.”

Asked why that shouldn’t apply to voucher students, Department of Education spokesman John
Charlton said it’s “because of the way legislators wrote the law.”

Republican officials who pushed for the guarantee said it wasn’t their intent to exempt any
publicly funded student from the guarantee, and leaving out voucher students was an oversight.

“We think they should be” required to pass the test to advance to the fourth grade, said Rob
Nichols, spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, who pushed the guarantee through the legislature in 2012. “
We think this will be the start of that conversation.”

State Sen. Peggy Lehner, who heads the Senate Education Committee, said there was no conscious
decision to omit voucher students from the requirements of the guarantee. State regulations just
generally don’t apply to private schools, she said. But she acknowledged that lawmakers could have
applied the guarantee to voucher students.

“I think that’s something that will be looked at down the road,” Lehner said. “Schools that
receive vouchers should be held more accountable for testing.”

State Rep. Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo, said it’s not true that there was never a conversation about
whether a controversial education reform would affect voucher students, one of the three classes of
publicly financed students in Ohio. She said that omitting voucher students was a deliberate policy
decision of the GOP, a gift to a favored constituency.

“It’s a well-known fact that Ohio’s education system doesn’t have a level playing field of
accountability,” Fedor said.

The Ohio School Boards Association pointed out in legislative hearings on the guarantee that
voucher students were exempt, said Damon Asbury, the association’s lobbyist.

The organization told legislators it was ironic that the reading test could help determine
whether students are eligible for vouchers that would send them to schools where they wouldn’t be
held accountable for their performance on the reading test.

It’s not well-known that voucher students are exempt, Fedor said. There is barely a mention of
it on the state Department of Education’s website, and the department doesn’t post the reading-test
results of voucher schools online alongside those of district and charter schools.
The Dispatch requested them, and the department provided the voucher-student numbers on a
computer disk.

Some states, such as Indiana and Louisiana, do apply all accountability measures to voucher
students, said Mark Real, president of KidsOhio.

“Our feeling is that we think good public policy should apply to everybody who accepts public
money,” Real said.

The assumption was that voucher students would be performing at a higher level, he said. “That
was sort of the hypothesis.”

Dan Dodd, executive director of the Ohio Association of Independent Schools, said that omitting
voucher students was a statement that lawmakers trust private schools’ judgment.

“Many private schools feel that people pay or choose a private-school education because they
rely on the professional expertise of the administrators,” Dodd said. “So to rely on a test, I
suppose you could view it as ironic, but that’s not really how independent schools choose to
measure their performance.”

They especially don’t want to make decisions based on a test “forced on them by the state,” Dodd
said.

Larry Keogh, a lobbyist for the Catholic Conference of Ohio, doesn’t recall voucher schools
coming up in the negotiations over the third-grade reading guarantee because state regulations
generally don’t apply to private schools. Asked whether state law should apply, given the poor
showing on the reading test, Keogh said it’s “a timing issue” because private schools don’t always
get voucher kids from the earliest grades.

“We believe that the earlier we received the scholarship kids into our schools, the better that
they will be able to perform academically,” Keogh said. “We’re confident that over a protracted
time of a few years, those children will be acting at grade level and performing as such.”